1.
San Francisco
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San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the birthplace of the United Nations, the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856, after three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines, San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, as of 2016, San Francisco is ranked high on world liveability rankings. The earliest archaeological evidence of habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the system gradually ended, and its lands became privatized. In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7,1846, during the Mexican–American War, montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. The California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers, with their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849. The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. Some of these approximately 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships, saloons and hotels, many were left to rot, by 1851 the harbor was extended out into the bay by wharves while buildings were erected on piles among the ships. By 1870 Yerba Buena Cove had been filled to create new land, buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations are dug for new buildings. California was quickly granted statehood in 1850 and the U. S. military built Fort Point at the Golden Gate, silver discoveries, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the wealth generated by the Gold Rush
2.
Consumerism
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Consumerism is a social and economic order and ideology that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. In economics, consumerism may refer to policies which emphasise consumption. In this sense, consumerism expresses the idea not of one man, one voice, but of one dollar, one voice, the term consumerism has several definitions. These definitions may not be related to other and confusingly. One sense of the term relates to efforts to support consumers interests, by the early 1970s it had become the accepted term for the field and began to be used in these ways, Consumerism is the concept that consumers should be informed decision makers in the marketplace. Practices such as product testing make consumers informed, Consumerism is the concept that the marketplace itself is responsible for ensuring social justice through fair economic practices. Consumer protection policies and laws compel manufacturers to make products safe, Consumerism refers to the field of studying, regulating, or interacting with the marketplace. The consumer movement is the movement which refers to all actions. While the above definitions were becoming established, other people using the term consumerism to mean high levels of consumption. This definition has gained popularity since the 1970s and began to be used in ways, Consumerism is the selfish and frivolous collecting of products. In protest against this, some people promote anti-consumerism and advocate simple living, Consumerism is a force from the marketplace which destroys individuality and harms society. It is related to globalization and in protest against this some people promote the anti-globalization movement, vance Packard worked to change the meaning of the term consumerism from a positive word about consumer practices to a negative word meaning excessive materialism and waste. The ads for his 1960 book The Waste Makers prominently featured the word consumerism in a negative way, the consumer society emerged in the late seventeenth century and intensified throughout the eighteenth century. This included sugar, tobacco, tea and coffee, these were grown on vast plantations in the Caribbean as demand steadily rose. In particular, sugar consumption in Britain during the course of the 18th century increased by a factor of 20, critics argue that colonialism was indeed a driver of consumerism, but they would place the emphasis on the supply rather than the demand as the motivating factor. An increasing mass of exotic imports as well as domestic manufactures had to be consumed by the number of people who had been consuming far less than was becoming necessary. That idea was produced later, more or less strategically in order to intensify consumption domestically, marketplaces expanded as shopping centres, such as the New Exchange, opened in 1609 by Robert Cecil in the Strand. Shops started to become important as places for Londoners to meet and socialise, restoration London also saw the growth of luxury buildings as advertisements for social position with speculative architects like Nicholas Barbon and Lionel Cranfield
3.
Thanksgiving (United States)
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Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day, is a public holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States. It originated as a harvest festival, Thanksgiving has been celebrated nationally on and off since 1789, after a proclamation by George Washington. Together with Christmas and the New Year, Thanksgiving is a part of the holiday season. The event that Americans commonly call the First Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World in October 1621 and this feast lasted three days, and—as accounted by attendee Edward Winslow—it was attended by 90 Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims. The New England colonists were accustomed to regularly celebrating thanksgivings—days of prayer thanking God for blessings such as military victory or the end of a drought. Setting aside time to give thanks for blessings, along with holding feasts to celebrate a harvest, are both practices that long predate the European settlement of North America. The first documented thanksgiving services in territory belonging to the United States were conducted by Spaniards. Thanksgiving services were routine in what became the Commonwealth of Virginia as early as 1607, with the first permanent settlement of Jamestown, in 1619,38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred in Charles City County, Virginia. The groups London Company charter specifically required that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned, in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God. Americans also trace the Thanksgiving holiday to a 1621 celebration at the Plymouth Plantation, autumn or early winter feasts continued sporadically in later years, first as an impromptu religious observance, and later as a civil tradition. Squanto, a Patuxet Native American who resided with the Wampanoag tribe, taught the Pilgrims how to catch eel and grow corn, squanto had learned the English language during his enslavement in England. The Wampanoag leader Massasoit had given food to the colonists during the first winter when supplies brought from England were insufficient, the Pilgrims celebrated at Plymouth for three days after their first harvest in 1621. Seventeenth-century accounts do not identify this as a thanksgiving observance, rather it followed the harvest and it included 50 persons who were on the Mayflower and 90 Native Americans. The feast was cooked by the four adult Pilgrim women who survived their first winter in the New World, along with young daughters, two colonists gave personal accounts of the 1621 feast in Plymouth. The Pilgrims, most of whom were Separatists, are not to be confused with Puritans, both groups were strict Calvinists, but differed in their views regarding the Church of England. Puritans wished to remain in the Anglican Church and reform it, for as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want, and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, and besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports
4.
Autonomous building
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Advocates of autonomous building describe advantages that include reduced environmental impacts, increased security, and lower costs of ownership. Some cited advantages satisfy tenets of green building, not independence per se, Off-grid buildings often rely very little on civil services and are therefore safer and more comfortable during civil disaster or military attacks. Most of the research and published articles concerning autonomous building focus on residential homes. These houses can be built now and it is possible to build a house with no bills for the same price as a conventional house, but it would be smaller. In the 1970s, a group of activists and engineers calling themselves the New Alchemists believed the warnings of imminent resource depletion and starvation, the New Alchemists were famous for the depth of research effort placed in their projects. Using conventional construction techniques, they designed a series of bioshelter projects and they published the plans for all of these, with detailed design calculations and blueprints. The Ark used wind based water pumping and electricity, and was self-contained in food production, as of January 2010, the successor organization to the New Alchemists has a web page up as the New Alchemy Institute. The PEI Ark has been abandoned and partially renovated several times, the 1990s saw the development of Earthships, similar in intent to the Ark project, but organized as a for-profit venture, with construction details published in a series of 3 books by Mike Reynolds. The building material is filled with earth. This makes a wall that has large amounts of thermal mass, berms are placed on exposed surfaces to further increase the houses temperature stability. The water system starts with water, processed for drinking, then washing, then plant watering, then toilet flushing. The cisterns are placed and used as thermal masses, Power, including electricity, heat and water heating, is from solar power. One major bank building in the Netherlands was constructed to be autonomous, as an architect or engineer becomes more concerned with the disadvantages of transportation networks, and dependence on distant resources, their designs tend to include more autonomous elements. The historic path to autonomy was a concern for secure sources of heat, power, water, a nearly parallel path toward autonomy has been to start with a concern for environmental impacts, which cause disadvantages. Autonomous buildings can increase security and reduce environmental impacts by using resources that would otherwise be wasted. Autonomy often dramatically reduces the costs and impacts of networks that serve the building, other impacted resources, such as oil reserves and the retention of the local watershed, can often be cheaply conserved by thoughtful designs. Autonomous buildings are usually energy-efficient in operation, and therefore cost-efficient, but they may substitute energy production or other techniques to avoid diminishing returns in extreme conservation. An autonomous structure is not always environmentally friendly, the goal of independence from support systems is associated with, but not identical to, other goals of environmentally responsible green building. First and fundamentally, independence is a matter of degree, living within an autonomous shelter may also require that party to make sacrifices with lifestyle choices, personal behavior, and social expectations to name a few
5.
Commodity fetishism
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As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value. Therefore, the exchange of commodities obscures the true economic character of the human relations of production. It is nothing but the social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, so it is in the world of commodities with the products of mens hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, marx borrowed the concept of fetishism from The Cult of Fetish Gods by Charles de Brosses, which proposed a materialist theory of the origin of religion. Marxs first mention of fetishism appeared in 1842, in his response to an article by Karl Heinrich Hermes. Hermes agreed with the German philosopher Hegel in regarding fetishism as the crudest form of religion, marx dismissed that argument, and Hermess definition of religion as that which elevates man above sensuous appetites. Therefore, the appetite of the fetish worshipper smashes the fetish when it ceases to be of service. Because their social co-existence, and its meaning, is expressed through market exchange, therefore, social relations are continually mediated and expressed with objects. In a capitalist society, the perception that the market is an independent, sentient entity, is how buyers, sellers. The work contract is the mask that obscures the economic exploitation of the difference between the paid for the labour of the worker, and the new value created by the labour of the worker. The buyers and the sellers determine and establish the economic and financial relationships, and afterwards compare the prices in, in History and Class Consciousness, György Lukács started from the theory of commodity fetishism for his development of reification as the principal obstacle to class consciousness. The economist Michael Perelman critically examined the systems from which arose intellectual property rights. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis critically reviewed the belief systems of the theory of human capital, knowledge, as the philosophic means to a better life, is contrasted with capitalist knowledge, produced to generate income and profit. Such commodification detaches knowledge and information from the person, because, as property, they are independent. The sociologists Frank Furedi and Ulrich Beck studied the development of commodified types of knowledge in the culture of risk prevention in the management of money. Hence, the fetishization of financial risk as a sum of money is a reification that distorts the perception of the true nature of financial risk
6.
Do it yourself
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Do it yourself is the method of building, modifying, or repairing things without the direct aid of experts or professionals. DIY behavior can be triggered by various motivations previously categorized as marketplace motivations, the term do-it-yourself has been associated with consumers since at least 1912 primarily in the domain of home improvement and maintenance activities. Subsequently, the term DIY has taken on a meaning that covers a wide range of skill sets. DIY is associated with the alternative rock, punk rock, and indie rock music scenes, indymedia networks, pirate radio stations. In this context, DIY is related to the Arts and Crafts movement, italian archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a 6th-century BC Greek structure in southern Italy that came with detailed assembly instructions and is being called an ancient IKEA building. Professor Christopher Smith, director of the British School at Rome and it looks as if someone was instructing others how to mass-produce components and put them together in this way. Much like the instruction booklets, various sections of the building were inscribed with coded symbols showing how the pieces slotted together. The characteristics of these inscriptions indicate they date back to around the 6th century BC, the building was built by Greek artisans coming from the Spartan colony of Taranto in Apulia. The philosopher Alan Watts reflected a sentiment, In the 1970s, DIY spread through the North American population of college-. In part, this movement involved the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes, but it also related to various projects expressing the social and environmental vision of the 1960s and early 1970s. The first Catalog, and its successors, used a definition of the term tools. There were informational tools, such as books, professional journals, courses, classes, there were specialized, designed items, such as carpenters and masons tools, garden tools, welding equipment, chainsaws, fiberglass materials and so on, even early personal computers. The designer J. Baldwin acted as editor to include such items, the Catalogs publication both emerged from and spurred the great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and do-it-yourself attitude of the late 1960s. Often copied, the Catalog appealed to a wide cross-section of people in North America and had a broad influence, for decades, magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated offered a way for readers to keep current on useful practical skills and techniques. DIY home improvement books began to flourish in the 1970s, first created as collections of magazine articles, an early, extensive line of DIY how-to books was created by Sunset Books, based upon previously published articles from their magazine, Sunset, based in California. Time-Life, Better Homes and Gardens, and other publishers soon followed suit, in the mid-1990s, DIY home-improvement content began to find its way onto the World Wide Web. HouseNet was the earliest bulletin-board style site where users could share information, homeTips. com, established in early 1995, was among the first Web-based sites to deliver free extensive DIY home-improvement content created by expert authors. Since the late 1990s, DIY has exploded on the Web through thousands of sites, in the 1970s, when home video came along, DIY instructors quickly grasped its potential for demonstrating processes by audio-visual means
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